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Deloitte’s Insights for C-suite executives and board members provide information and resources to help address the challenges of managing risk for both value creation and protection, as well as increasing compliance requirements.

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Deloitte Views & Analysis

Treasurers clearly have strong mandates to be strategic, with more than 70% of respondents to a recent survey citing mandates from their CFOs in areas including liquidity risk management, efficient capital-markets access and risk management, according to the “2015 Global Corporate Treasury Survey” from Deloitte & Touche LLP. But significant challenges persist for treasurers, such as cyberthreats and navigating emerging markets.

With aggregate U.S. private-sector defined benefit pension plan assets exceeding $3 trillion, more plan sponsors are choosing to shift the liability off their balance sheets by offering voluntary lump-sum payments to pension participants or transferring defined benefit risk to an insurer through an annuity buyout—actions some call “derisking pension plans.” Learn what to consider when contemplating pension plan derisking.

Effective transfer pricing programs may increase both tax efficiency and cash for repatriation or investment, while improper allocations have the potential to artificially inflate revenue and cash balances. The integration of strategic transfer pricing, tax and treasury can help organizations manage taxes and address treasury and cash management considerations. It may also result in a more efficient business model at the global level.

Deloitte Insights for CFOs

Decisions pertaining to people are among the hardest tasks confronting new or incoming executives. Often, new executives look back on the first year in their new roles and cite moving too slowly to resolve talent issues as their biggest regret, says Dr. Ajit Kambil, global research director for Deloitte’s CFO program. He discusses talent strategies related to reducing the time lost in trying to “rescue” key staff and the importance of knowing the critical trade-offs between individual rescue efforts and recruiting staff with the requisite skills and temperament to succeed.

Technology Insights from Deloitte

CIOs are expanding and redefining their roles to include monetizing IT assets and encouraging innovation. To do so, they need strong, top-down support, an eye toward user experience, and an agile mindset, says Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, Inc.

For many financial services firms, work remains to operationalize the governance structures they have adopted. Further, expectations regarding governance have shifted: Stakeholders now see boards as more accountable for the effectiveness of their overall governance process. This shift is real, and it is significant. It will likely amount to an expectation of greater board involvement in the means by which governance is effected, and for more active oversight by the board and its committees.

The securities regulatory landscape will continue to present significant challenges as the year further unfolds, with broker-dealers facing new or modified requirements that could significantly affect how they do business. Moreover, the SEC is expected to continue its scrutiny of firms dually registered as broker-dealers and investment advisers. Learn more about which regulatory efforts organizations are refining to meet rules now in place, and how they are preparing to work with rules that are still evolving.

The FASB, jointly with the IASB, issued a new revenue standard in May 2014 that will replace most current revenue recognition guidance. Since the standard’s issuance, stakeholders have raised a number of implementation questions, many of which have been discussed by the joint transition resource group on revenue recognition at recent meetings. In this Deloitte Heads Up newsletter summaries and comparisons of the tentative decisions made at the boards’ joint meetings are discussed.

President Barack Obama stepped up efforts in January to encourage the public and private sectors to more readily share cyberthreat information, yet many organizations have legitimate reasons for their reluctance to collaborate. Focusing on shared cyber risks, rather than competing agendas, may help both sides come together and overcome their information-sharing challenges.

Much has been achieved in the last decade toward improving the quality of fair value measurements, but more is required in the coming years. Learn areas where applying greater focus can help public companies with significant fair value requirements in their financial reporting address audit and regulatory risks, enhance their credibility in the investment community, and, ultimately, increase their enterprises’ value in the marketplace.

Crisis simulations can be an effective tool for risk management, but properly done, they require meticulous preparation. While an ineffective crisis simulation does little more than dampen morale, an effective one puts the organization to a stringent test and leaves the whole of the organization, from the boardroom to the front lines, confident and working as a cohesive team.

At a recent meeting of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, members discussed disclosure guidance as it pertains to ASC 820, the fair value rule, and came to tentative agreement on several important issues. Included in the discussion was whether to modify or eliminate disclosure requirements having to do with the valuation process for Level 3 fair value measurements, estimates of timing of future events and Level 3 rollforward rules. New requirements for gains and losses were also considered as were industry-specific topics.

Members of the World Economic Forum’s “Partnering for Cyber Resilience” initiative proposed a model that organizations across industries can use to calculate their exposure to various cyber risks and quantify their impact, allowing for more effective investments in projects and programs aimed at addressing cyber threats. Known as cyber value-at-risk, the model helps organizations estimate potential losses from cyber attacks and shore up their security and risk management programs.

The rise in cyber crime and its costly toll are driving interest in cyber insurance as one complementary element of the cyber risk management approach, especially for those organizations that have come to view a cyber attack as inevitable. Learn important considerations for selecting cyber insurance, including understanding risk exposures, policy complexities and the claims process, as well as how coverage can vary among policies.